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|| SportsShooter.com: Member Message Board
Drobo Reliabilty, Answered
Jim Pierce, Photographer
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Waltham | MA | USA | Posted: 9:23 PM on 08.13.10 |
->> A few threads ago there was a topic about the Drobo and I asked many questions on "why" a Drobo and NOT duplicate USB drives"? My biggest worry was that the Drobo was a single point of failure, yes cost is/was a concern but not as much.... nobody that responded, even the highest level of user could answer the question about reliability and is the Drobo a single point of failure. No way was I going to put 8-16TB of data into a single unit that was in control of this amount of data, without a sense of confidence that the unit was NOT the single point of failure. This is why I use duplicate USB HD's.
So for those that want to know.... I called Data Robotics tech support and asked them a ton of questions about the design, the FMEA (Failure Modes Effects Analysis),that I mentioned in a previous post and in general terms the unit is "not likely" to cause a loss of data. The unit has "little memory that it uses during a rebuild and actually compresses and decompresses data as it is transferred. The data is not deleted from the original HD until it is copied to the new HD.
I asked what would happen if a resistor/diode failed, or the power failed during a rebuild and basically it seems that they leave space on the working drives to cover this or the decompressing/compressing takes care of it.
The only situation that data "might" be lost was if two drives failed around the same time and if a drive failed during a rebuild and there was not enough space on other drives.
I am paraphrasing some above but in general my confidence in the Drobo is high, just needed to know this BEFORE I change ways and am actually surprised that those that use it were not as worried.
I apologize to those I may have offended with my hard head about the issue in the previous postings!!
Jim |
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Eric Canha, Photographer
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Brockton | MA | United States | Posted: 10:10 PM on 08.13.10 |
->> Good to know, and seeing as I was one of the hard heads on the other side of the post, THANK YOU for looking into it and getting a 'techie' answer that the rest of us might not fully understand but will keep us feeling warm and fuzzy at night.
How's THAT for a run on sentence?!
Personally I'd still rather that they put in a hot swappable ps and cooling units. Or at least take their "Beyond RAID" architecture and build a box one level up. Or maybe go the Dell route and let the end users spec the machine.
Anyway I'm glad that the "what if's" have been better addressed. |
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N. Scott Trimble, Photographer
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Lake Oswego | OR | USA | Posted: 1:28 AM on 08.14.10 |
| ->> I tried to answer a few days ago, but my password wasn't working. I have had mine since it first was offered with firewire, and its been super reliant. The way it strip records data is highly stable, unless like they said, two drives fail at once. |
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Yamil Sued, Photographer, Photo Editor
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Peoria | AZ | USA | Posted: 2:22 AM on 08.14.10 |
->> And if two drives fail at once...
I was told to clone one of the good drives and do the rebuild with the cloned drive. That is what the tech guy told me today...
I just started a massive data dump onto a Portable Drive I'm taking next week, it's slow through the Ethernet connection to the Drobo Share.
But.... I'll be backing up my RAW files now stored on External Single Drives onto my first Gen DROBO populated with Four 1TB Drives.
I'll put the single Drives off site for storage.
Jim, I'm glad Data Robotics gave you the info you wanted.
Now you probably know why I liked the Drobos so much. |
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